New Statesman

Can’t say I’ve ever bought into the idea of penis envy, but man, being a man looks like a goddamn breeze sometimes, and if that’s what having a nob gets you, then heck maybe I am a bit jealous.

Take, for example, looking after your own kids. When a woman does it, no one cares. In fact, she’s just doing what she’s meant to. In actual fact, it’s nice of everyone to let her do it and to be honest isn’t she slightly taking the piss by having time off work, and she’d better not embarrass everyone by showing a bit of nipple. But let a dad so much as pick up a bottle, and watch the world swoon while angel choirs descend to sing oh isn’t he great and isn’t mum lucky that he babysits. Pass the wetwipes, I seem to have been sick.

Low expectations. That’s what I’m talking about. That’s the great bonus of masculinity. But even I was taken aback to see a man getting praised for, um, fancying his wife. Robbie Tripp describes himself as a “wordsmith, public speaker, and creative activist” and the author of “an abstract manifesto for disruptive creativity”, which to be honest sound like the kind of things you’d make up to get worried relatives off your back. (“No grandma, I’m not unemployed, I’m a creative activist.”) He can now add to that CV the impressive achievement of being keen on the woman he married.

If you want to be happy, there is apparently a trick: offload the shitwork onto somebody else. Hire cleaner. Get your groceries delivered. Have someone else launder your sheets. These are the findings published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, but it’s also been the foundation of our economy since before we had economics. Who does the offloading? Men. Who does the shitwork? Women.

Over the last 40 years, female employment has risen to almost match the male rate, but inside the home, labour sticks stubbornly to old patterns: men self-report doing eight hours of housework a week, while women slog away for 13. When it comes to caring for family members, the difference is even more stark: men do ten hours, and women 23.

We are so wrong about suicide. What we want more than anything is for it to make sense. To turn the life of the victim into a good story, with all the narrative beats leading up to a satisfying conclusion in their death. No mess and no untidiness. That’s especially true when the person who has died by suicide is famous – someone on whom we are already used to writing our own meanings. We start to wind myths around them.

So when Linkin Park singer Chester Bennington apparently died by suicide on Thursday, this is what happened. People started looking for patterns, turning his work into a prelude to his suicide, even implying that his death brought greater meaning to Linkin Park’s tightly-wound songs. “Linkin Park star Chester Bennington’s hurt made beautiful music,” said one headline; “Those lyrics […] are of course now extremely poignant,” remarked one obituary.

It should be obvious why it’s tacky to turn a human death into an intensifying filter for our own aesthetic responses. It’s perhaps less obvious, but more important, to understand why this is dangerous. Saying that Bennington’s suicide proves the worth of his music comes under the heading of “[promoting] the idea that suicide achieves results”, something the Samaritans warns against in its reporting guidelines. The reason for this warning is that such narratives contribute to the risk of “suicide contagion”, where other people attempt suicide in imitation of the reported act.

It can be hard to keep track of what qualifies as Legitimate Feminist Business (LFB), but here is a rough-and-ready test that you can use. Step one: be female. Step two: publicly criticise the thing that you think might be sexism. Step three: wait and see if you get abuse for it, and if yes, congratulate yourself on having correctly identified some LFB. Or as Lewis’s Law, formulated by the New Statesman’s Helen Lewis, more elegantly puts it: “The comments on any article about feminism justify feminism.”

Unfortunately, the abuse you’re now dealing with might well distract and depress you so much that addressing the LFB will drift into the remote realms of unlikelihood – indeed, at least half the purpose of anti-feminist harassment is to grind feminists down past the point of doing anything – but there you go. At least you get the satisfaction of knowing you were right.

Right now, for example, Yvette Cooper should be feeling the warm glow of vindication. On Saturday, the Labour MP gave a speech to the Fabian Society which in part addressed the issue of online abuse, including that targeted at women of all political affiliations. As soon as it was reported, she was being called “bully”, “bitch”, “Tory” and “saboteur”, accused of using the abuse issue to attack Corbyn and charged with having failed to defend Diane Abbott. The abuse didn’t all come from the left, but a lot of it did.

When Robert Trigg was given a life sentence for the killings of two women this week, it was much too late. Not just because it came six years after the death of Susan Nicholson – who Trigg murdered in 2011 – but because in 2011, he should already have been convicted of the manslaughter of Caroline Devlin in 2006.

The deaths of both women had been declared not suspicious by the police on first investigation, despite evidence of Trigg’s controlling behaviour and history of intimate partner violence. It’s only because Nicholson’s parents sought justice for their daughter at their own expense – hiring an independent barrister and pathologist to reexamine the original pathologist’s report – that Trigg isn’t still at large, terrorising another woman in her own home, perhaps killing again.

Sometimes, of course, criminals exert great deviousness and the police have to exert even greater doggedness and ingenuity to catch them. That, however, is not the case here.

Here is a tip for the squeamish when reading a Ben Myers novel. Imagine the worst thing that could happen to the characters, and then drop the book, because whatever Myers has imagined will definitely be worse than your version. The Gallows Pole is Myers’s sixth novel, and its territory is recognisably his own.

A northern, rural setting: here, the Yorkshire moors. An inspired-by-true-events story: this time, the Cragg Vale Coiners, a notorious ­late-18th-century gang of forgers. And a profane lyricism punctuated by the kind of ultra-violence that turns reading into a kind of dare. As in Ted Hughes’s Crow poems or David Peace’s Red Riding sequence, Myers’s capacity for the grotesque is constantly threatening to breach your tolerance of it.

“People will always need walls. Boundaries are what makes us civilised,” Myers has an itinerant “waller” say here. But the author is interested in what happens when those boundaries are uncertain, or broken. Beyond our self-created limits, there is a wildness both dreadful and transfixing, and David Hartley – the King of the Coiners – is its avatar here.

I always try to be nice to canvassers, even the ones from the Green Party (sorry, Greens). I do this for the same reason I’ve never been canvassing myself, despite having been a Labour member for a few years now: I can’t imagine anything more appalling than knocking on door after door to be told where to stick it. But there are, incredibly, people who volunteer themselves for this social horror. Without coercion or payment, thousands and thousands of Labour activists stomp out the pavements in seats where every vote counts and in seats where they barely have a hope of making a difference. They do it for the party.

It’s extraordinary enough that candidates put themselves through elections. (In April, I spoke to one Labour MP who casually told me they were still paying down debts from the 2015 campaign, and now facing the possibility of being unemployed in seven weeks.) But at least for them there’s the possibility, however slim, of a seat in parliament at the end of it. The foot soldiers, though – for the foot soldiers, the only incentive is loyalty and the thrill of the fight (such thrills being hard to come by when you’re getting up at 5:30am to run dawn leaflet drops). And they still do it.

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About me

I’m a columnist, critic and feature writer with bylines at the New Statesman, the Guardian, the Spectator, the Independent, Eurogamer, Stylist, Grazia, Elle and more. Regular TV and radio appearances, including Newsnight and Today. Available for teaching and talks. Anti-fun feminist. Represented by Juliet Pickering at Blake Friedman.